Cleveland Clinic and CWRU need the best from Lord Norman Foster as he develops design for Health Education Campus (Commentary)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The city's collection of buildings designed by world-famous architects is about to get bigger – and that's a good thing for a place that ought to be thinking on a global scale about its future.

The Clinic and CWRU plan to break ground this spring for the 485,000-square-foot building on a highly visible, 11-acre site along East 93rd Street between Euclid and Chester Avenues, at the gateway to the 165-acre Clinic campus.

Having a building by Foster will add an important architectural voice to Cleveland. A native of Manchester who served as a Royal Air Force pilot in the 1950s, Foster has been showered by honors throughout his 50-year career, including his knighthood and the Pritzker Prize, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel.

His credits include some of the world's most impressive and astonishing contemporary buildings and structures, including the bone-thin Millau Viaduct in France; the renovated Reichstag in Berlin, whose glassy dome has become a symbol of transparent government; and the HSBC Tower in Hong Kong, which displays its elegant, earthquake-resistant steel structure outside its glass skin.

The Clinic/CWRU project will be a fresh sign of Cleveland's evolution as a postindustrial city that mixes gritty authenticity with state-of-the-art innovation and lively, cosmopolitan urbanism – in neighborhoods where growth is happening.

But the project also raises perennial questions about why clients often go far afield to seek design talent, and whether, in every case, the out-of-towners do their best work in Cleveland.

Important buildings by non-locals in the past two decades include I.M. Pei's pugnaciously assertive Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum; the Key Tower downtown and four buildings at the Clinic designed by Cesar Pelli; and Frank Gehry's Peter B. Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School of Management at CWRU.

More recently, there's Rafael Vinoly's expansion and renovation of the Cleveland Museum of Art; Farshid Moussavi's new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; and the outstanding Uptown apartments by Stanley Saitowitz.

It's arguable whether the Rock Hall represents Pei at his best, although I think the building has stood up well over the past two decades. The Gehry building at CWRU is a solid example of his work, though perhaps not one of his very best. The more recent projects, including the buildings at Uptown, are, on balance, very strong.

In response to such projects, however, many observers, including commenters on cleveland.com, often ask why local clients go halfway around the world to choose designers. The underlying assumption is that someone local could have done just as well.

But that's not always the case. Cleveland has a strong architectural community. As recently documented by the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, the field employs 1,890 in Cuyahoga County, with a 2012 payroll of nearly $112 million.

But the city's talent pool isn't big enough to include lead design expertise in certain types of buildings, including large museums, convention centers, big sports facilities and skyscrapers, which explains why clients have sought out-of-town talent in those areas.

In other areas, including health-care design, theaters, academic buildings and performing arts centers, Cleveland architects compete locally and nationally with success, and often export their skills to other markets.

There's also a growing list of notable local projects designed by Cleveland-area architects. It includes Denver Brooker's new Cuyahoga County headquarters and Flats East Bank office tower; Scott Dimit's handsome portfolio of apartments and condominiums; and Westlake Reed Leskosky's Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and various hospital projects for the Cleveland Clinic.

Still, it's perfectly understandable that clients who seek a global profile for certain projects want to engage world-renowned talents, in part for the cachet and fresh viewpoints they provide, and because there can be a qualitative difference in design -- when an out-of-towner is at his or her best. It also makes sense in an age of global markets to look beyond Cleveland and Cuyahoga County when the occasion calls for it.

The question for the Clinic/CWRU project is whether Foster + Partners will rise to this particular occasion, after having provided the Clinic with the 2012 master plan that helped identify the site for the Health Education Campus.

Clinic CEO Dr. Delos "Toby" Cosgrove, and his counterpart, Barbara Snyder, president of CWRU, are excited about the potential of their project to transform medical education through collaborative interactions among the four main programs to be housed inside.

These include the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine, and Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing. The building will also contain a new physician assistant program planned by CWRU.

Plans for the new building are moving quickly. And so far they look encouraging. The design features floor levels defined by horizontal bands of metal and glass, with entries highlighted soaring, rounded columns reminiscent of ancient Greek and Roman temple porticos.

The design also features a clear nod to Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses in the sweeping horizontality and deep overhang of the new building's bladelike cornice, which mingles Wrightian associations of freedom and movement with those of sheltering protection and the promise of a hearth within.

In this case, the building's centerpiece will be a soaring, light-filled atrium designed to encourage interactions among faculty and approximately 2,300 students inside.

The crisp, nearly photographic renderings of the project suggest the building will be imposing and formal, but also uplifting, wide open and full of light.

It's also clear that many details are in flux, both on the interior and the exterior. These include everything from floor layouts to articulation of metal and glass elements on the building's facades.

And it's the resolution of those details that will likely determine whether the Health Education Campus combines the bold gestures of its roof canopy and big interior atrium with the fine-grained quality that has been a hallmark of Foster at his best.

In a lecture at the InterContinental Hotel on Nov. 19, Foster briefly flashed images of the Health Education Campus on large screens and described the project as an example of his career-long interest in using structural technology to create grand interior social spaces.

The implication was that the Cleveland building would be viewed as an expression of core principles that exemplify Foster's important works.

Certainly, that potential exists. But to realize it, Foster and his local associate architects at Westlake Reed Leskosky in Cleveland need to follow through as the design continues to develop.

And that means working with the highest creativity at a time when the project's final costs have not yet been fixed, and when downward pressure on the budget will certainly be present.

Let's hope that all parties can make the Health Education Campus the enduring, high-quality statement it should be.

Aside from satisfying fundamental functional requirements, the project ought to show that Cleveland knows not only how to recruit great architectural talent, but to get the best out of it.